Playing today at the Chicago International Film Festival

October 12, 2009|By Christopher Borrelli and Michael Phillips

'About Elly' ***

So, you're an American moviegoer who's heard about the revolution in Iranian cinema, which has been going on for a decade now, but remain gunshy? Convinced it's all quiet meditations on children chasing white balloons through villages and forlorn men sitting for hours in rusting vans set against almost existentially barren brown-white landscapes? Asghar Farhadi, whose taut fourth movie took the best narrative feature award at last spring's TriBeCa Film Festival, is an engrossing placebo of sorts, a tale of how lies compound lies that, without overly lashing out, takes a hard swing at a closed society constructed on delusion. The first lie? That Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), a nursery school teacher from Tehran, and the young Iranian newly divorced from his German wife, are newlyweds. It's a necessary lie, told to an old woman who owns a beach house on the Caspian. Elly has been talked into a long seaside holiday with a large group of friends. She is being pushed into a relationship with the divorcee. But, soon, she vanishes, and what feels at first like a homage to "L'Avventura" or Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock," ominous and dense with the inexplicable, slides more comfortably into a drama about middle-class Iranians and deceit, which is universal.

2:30 p.m. Monday, 8:30 p.m. Oct. 20.

-- Christopher Borrelli

'Antichrist' ***1/2

At its Cannes premiere I was so wiped out by all the great, terrible and warring aspects of Lars von Trier's latest -- which is the real "Couples Retreat" -- I could barely write straight. Seeing it a second time only confirmed my first agog impression. The first hour is, I think, a masterpiece. While making love in silver-toned slow motion, a therapist (Willem Dafoe, empathetic and arrogant in just the right blend) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg, who deservedly won best actress at Cannes) fail to hear that something's afoot in their son's bedroom. After this hideously cruel prologue and a long, uncertain grieving process, the couple repairs to their cabin in the woods so that Gainsbourg's character can try to heal the wounds. Mistake! Von Trier's nightmare, photographed by Anthony Dod Mantle ("Slumdog Millionaire"), trades evocative insinuation for literal-minded, outlandishly explicit horrors in the later scenes. Mainlining his fellow Scandinavian paranoiac, August Strindberg, von Trier ventures so far beyond garden-variety misogyny (while creating images of jaw-dropping self-mutilation and "Misery"-style problem-solving) he's practically inventing a new realm of fear and loathing. But if "Antichrist" is nothing but a nihilistic jape, why does von Trier's latest -- his most vital work since the Bjork musical "Dancer in the Dark" -- continue to roll around in my head? He may be kidding with some of his crazier notions, as when a woodland fox delivers a key line of dialogue, but this is rhapsodically potent filmmaking that cannot be denied.